Although the world of work has kept me from churning out my beloved gifs in my spare time, I have been quite active chess-wise. I played in a rather intense Christmas tournament with 7 4-hour games in 4 days and also added a couple of team-event games to my OTB experience. Yesterday, I received my first official rating: 1689.

I hope to return to some of the games I’ve played eventually and squeeze out a gif or two. In the meantime, it’s work and OTB. Have I mentioned that LinuxGuy_on_FICS is fast becoming my favourite chess writer? His thoughts on the importance of ideas versus calculation sound extremely feasible to me. I feel I’m still at a stage where learning abstract ideas benefits my game tremendously, but I also begin to get a sense for what more advanced players mean when they talk about the importance of calculation. It’s very easy to rely solely on your experience and your rucksack of ideas and play like a robot; very much like opening-zombies who simply memorise lines and don’t start playing “real chess”, as it were, until move 15. Hence I shall continue with my quest to understand and illustrate basic ideas, but I shall also work harder on calculation. Not quite sure how, though. Tactics puzzles, after all?